OES makes a difference with new fundraiser

“Raise Craze” is the new fundraiser for Olney Elementary School, and students are “paying it forward” by doing acts of kindness for a good cause.

Beginning Sept. 11 and continuing for two weeks, students performed acts of kindness for every donation by the community. Examples of kindness pledges include cleaning up trash, holding doors open for others, giving compliments, reading to others, and helping bilingual students at school.

“Our goal was to have 1,000 school-wide acts of kindness. We have already surpassed that goal with a week left to do more acts,” said Summer Branum, president of the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) when interviewed Sept. 18. She said the financial goal was $15,000, and nearly $13,000 had been raised by then.

Each homeroom has their own class goals as well,” said Branum. “We have lots of great prizes that keep kids interested in participating, but the biggest prize will be the kids having the experiences of doing all these kind things and learning the lessons that will go along with that.”

The PTO board changed this year’s fundraiser from previous years. The board “proposed this new fundraiser to PTO because while our past fundraisers [primarily catalog sales] have been effective in raising the money we need for our yearly budget, they have had some drawbacks,” Branum explained. “First, parents and family members often find themselves buying the same products year after year. We have had valid complaints about the repetition of products or product quality.”

“Another problem is fulfillment,” Branum said. “With over 100 kids selling 10 to 15 products each, getting the orders from the school to the customers has been hard to manage, as well as finding the space for storing the products.”

An additional issue was that the school only gets 40 percent of gross product sales.

“It has always bothered me a lot to see our community payout $30,000 but only keep $12,000 here in town,” Branum said. “I do not want to be too negative about catalog fundraisers -- there are many great benefits to them, and they work very well, especially for smaller groups like boosters, etc.… But with Raise Craze, we will keep more than 90 percent of our money raised to use at OES, and it’s a nice break from the catalogs.”

Noting that catalog sales “served us well in the past,” Branum didn’t count them out. “There may be times where we rely on them again in the future,” she said.